An Analysis of Australian Research Council’s Grants in Religion

In this article, we used the meta-metrics approach to analyse research grants in the Religion and Religious Studies field of research (FoR) in Australia, with respect to their metric properties, significance, similarity, and usage characterisation. Whilst comparing and contrasting various results from the dataset of the Australian Research Council (ARC) on the success of its grant capture, we found the following: an imbalance in the FoR between the quantity of publications and that of national competitive grant capture in Australia (highlighting the problem of research significance) and a disparity between the use of keywords on religion without using corresponding FoR codes (as an expression of usage characterisation). These findings are examined in parallel with the last 2018 ARC’s Excellence in Research for Australia report.